I don’t think anyone is claiming it’s the death of Reddit. They are going dark for 2 days, then it will be business as usual.
So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.
So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.
Anyways, IMO most of the really interesting discussion on the topic happens on twitter already. My best guess is that instead of finding a new home for the subreddit, we'll eventually just either give control to some other body (or reddit takes it from us) or we'll just set the subreddit to public again and let it go its way without being very involved (Most of the current mods weren't really involved anymore anyways). I'd love to find a new place devoted to this topic (twitter definitely sucks for long form discussion), but I haven't found such a place, and don't have the time/energy to set one up myself.
/u/spez mentioned in the shitshow that was his AMA, that there would be moderation tools provided by Reddit, but nothing in that direction has ever been shown.
So yes, maybe until the end of June it will be as usual, but afterward many parts of the platform will be unusable with the amount of spam and missing moderation.
Maybe that effect is overstated.
This is a bit similar to Stack Overflow claiming only 11% of mods are participating in the strike there. What they didn't say is that it includes almost all of the active Stack Overflow mods and some community-run anti-spam and moderation tools. So the coverage of actual mod activity is far larger than that number might make you think (and the number is of course outdated as well).
> About 3% of mod actions come from third-party apps, and we’ve reached out to communities who moderate almost exclusively using these apps to ensure we address their needs.
It’s similar to how the API is limited compared to what the official app can do and lacks many basic features (streaming or callbacks) that are needed to avoid polling it. They’ve said before that if they started charging there would be improvements to the API. Where are they? Are developers supposed to take them on faith/trust? I’m pretty sure Reddit has burned what little of that they have left.
I wouldn't be shocked if that's because third party bots are counted in there, and in terms of sheer scale of spam etc that is 80+ of mod actions.
Huffman has a very good reason to use figures in a misleading way to downplay the impact here.